Figure 1.

Jitka Nováková as Eva in The Fruit of Paradise

(Ovoce stromů rajských jíme, dir. Věra Chytilová,
Czechoslovakia, 1969)
Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit
of Paradise: A Tale of a Feminine
Aesthetic, Dancing Color,
and a Doll Who Kills the Devil

Iveta Jusová and Dan Reyes

The 1969 avant-­garde Czech New Wave film The Fruit of Paradise
(Ovoce stromů rajských jíme, dir. Věra Chytilová, Czechoslovakia) has
frequently left even admiring audiences at a loss for words. Styl-
ized, irreverent, and iconographically ambiguous, Fruit arrived
out-­of-­step both in its Czechoslovak debut in the post – Prague
Spring crackdown and in the less than welcoming international
festival circuit.1 Fruit has engendered plural and durable, but also
changing, misconnections: the film frustrated the expectations of
its initial audiences in the East and West, and it continues to puz-
zle viewers, albeit in new ways, more than four decades later. In
our experience, viewers of Fruit today commonly describe the film
as pretty and bold, a visual feast if you like, but then set it aside as
the paler sibling to Chytilová’s better-­known 1966 release, Daisies
(Sedmikrásky, Czechoslovakia).2 Contrary to such polite deference,
we would like to suggest that the curious indigestibility of Fruit

Camera Obscura 87, Volume 29, Number 3

doi 10.1215/02705346-2801518 © 2014 by Camera Obscura
Published by Duke University Press

65
66  •  Camera Obscura

may well be deeply entangled with the other features that make
the film both notable and compelling.
Those simply looking for a sequel to the dissident feminist
New Wave sensibility that many found in Daisies  have been generally
vexed by Fruit. With Daisies  and its unreserved, blatant insolence
of a youthful femininity that is utterly uninterested in submitting
to establishment expectations, Chytilová invites consideration as a
feminist provocateur even as she resists such a label. On the surface,
it seems less likely that Fruit would prompt the same impression.
Still, the cultural-­political implications for gender appear to us no
less profound in Fruit, and such implications are perhaps more
complex in the way in which they are interwoven within a work that
makes use of its fullest sensory vocabulary and emotional tonal-
ity. Whereas in Daisies  feminist outrage hits the viewer over the
head like a grand crystal chandelier, in Fruit, the feminist implica-
tions are more subtly woven into the flow of the intense sensual
experiences — both visual and musical — that the film generates.
Since Fruit  is highly expressive and keenly invested in stylistic
experimentation, and since it works largely by producing potent
sensory impressions, one of the film’s distinguishing effects, we
argue, is its enactment of feminine difference in a cinematically
unique, vivid, and multidimensional manner. Fruit produces a
unique feminine-­feminist aesthetic, one that we believe lends itself
to a reading of the film as a cinematic version of écriture féminine.
Applying theories of sexual difference, we explore some of the ways
in which this feminine aesthetic is enacted and fashioned through
Fruit’s experimental cinematography, its carefully conceived cos-
tume and set design, and its deliberately naive acting style. We find
the filmmakers’ employments of color particularly noteworthy and
argue that Fruit’s chromatic experimentation suggests intriguing
gendered implications for color.

Feminism by Any Other Name

Chytilová’s work has frequently been labeled feminist, often
against her own wishes, including in texts harboring no appar-
ent investment in gender issues. For instance, in GEN (Galerie elity
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 67

národa) (Gallery of the Nation’s Elite, Česká televize, 1993), a tele-

vision documentary series about the lives of influential Czechs,
Chytilová was introduced in a manner telling of the popular
Czech understanding of feminism: “Although considered a femi-
nist, she is also a loving mother.”3 More interesting for our pur-
poses are the earnest, nuanced, and cogent scholarly explorations
of Chytilová’s work from informed gender studies perspectives by
Dina Iordanova, Petra Hanáková, and others. A new generation
of feminist film critics and scholars addressing east-­central Euro-
pean cinema has come of age, and within their critical discourse
Daisies in particular is celebrated as a “critical comment[ary] on
the conventional male-­dominated culture,”4 a feminist allegory, 5
and a film that explores rebellious female desire and that engen-
dered “subversive fissures . . . at the height of the masculinized
New Wave.”6
In arguing for the relevance of gender in Chytilová’s work,
it is important to note and, if possible, to appreciate something of
the basis for the discomfort the director has expressed regarding
her relationship to such standpoints and labels. Chytilová has long
refuted any association with feminism, and she did so particularly
vigorously in a 2000 interview with the Guardian. Kate Connolly,
the interviewer, writes:

So does Chytilová consider herself a feminist, and if so, how does this
affect her film-­making? “Is your newspaper a serious one?” She peers
over her large sunglasses. “You ask pointless and primitive questions.”
Her steam rising, she explains that she does not believe in feminism
per se, but in individualism. “If there’s something you don’t like, don’t
keep to the rules — break them. I’m an enemy of stupidity and simple-­
mindedness in both men and women and I have rid my living space of
these traits.”7

Noting a similar disinclination to accept the feminist label among

many other Eastern European filmmakers whose work is clearly
critical of traditional gender relations and seeks to subvert them,
Iordanova comments on “a situation that leaves us facing the curi-
ous phenomenon of clearly committed feminist film-­makers who
are nonetheless reluctant to be seen as such.”8
68  •  Camera Obscura

There are various legitimate reasons for Chytilová’s disincli-

nation for feminism, ranging from film industry survival pragmat-
ics to the nuanced implications the label has tended to carry with
it across cultural borders. Czech women have experienced a long
history of sometimes unfortunate encounters with Western femi-
nists making errant assumptions about their supposed sisters from
the former Eastern bloc. In her classic 1998 polemical essay, “Why
We Resist Western-­Style Feminism,” Jiřina Šiklová writes specifically
of Czech perceptions of Western feminism and their consequences
for Czech feminism. She considers the effects of perceptions that
Western feminists have too often approached Czech women from
a presumed position of intellectual superiority, especially in the
1990s; of the uneasiness among Czech women about Western
feminism’s perceived aggressiveness and presumed antimale atti-
tude, considered irrelevant in a context where men and women
saw themselves as struggling together against the oppressive social
system; of the reluctance among Czech women toward the taken-­
for-­granted expectation that they adopt ready-­made concepts from
a linguistically and culturally foreign setting; and of the overall
post-­1989 mistrust of all ideologies and “ism”s.9 Adding to Šiklová’s
list, Jiřina Šmejkalová reminds us of the Czech press’s uncritical
post-­1989 coverage of the chauvinistic prejudices of some Czech
male immigrant scholars who, returning from exile at the time,
routinely spoke of feminism with ridicule, mockery, and derision,
generating misconceptions in the Czech cultural consciousness
that have proven difficult to shake off.10
Whether or not any of the above explains Chytilová’s own
disinclination to view her work as feminist, contextualizing the
feminist label is relevant for our discussion of how she treats gender
issues in her work. Choosing or refusing to identify as a feminist is,
of course, different from working creatively from the standpoint
of a woman seeking to achieve the full potential of her voice in
a male-­dominated field and culture. That in the 1960s Chytilová
was clearly aware of the impact of traditional gender expectations
in her own life, and that she fought against them consciously, is
apparent from her biography. Having started her film career as a
junior assistant on set, Chytilová realized that unlike her male col-
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 69

leagues, she would never be allowed to apply her own ideas in film
production. This realization propelled her determination to study
at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in
Prague (FAMU): “Sure, I could see around me that assistants were
commonly graduating towards directing . . . but with women this
was out of the question.”11 Her 2010 autobiography, written with
Tomáš Pilát, also suggests that even though she was ready to strug-
gle against the conventional gender expectations that hindered
her creative potential, she was able to exploit these expectations on
other occasions. “Your mouths are full of women and of the impor-
tance of motherhood for our society. Well, I am a woman and a
mother, so let me work!” she argued publicly and loudly when, after
1969, she was barred from producing new work.12 Yet her situation
only began to change in 1975, the United Nations’ International
Women’s Year, partly in response to an appeal sent to Czechoslovak
president Gustáv Husák by the French committee of the Festival of
Women’s Authors, which allowed Chytilová to participate in the
festival. The next film Chytilová would be allowed to direct, Hra o
jablko (The Apple Game, Czechoslovakia, 1977), dealt with the recog-
nizably women’s issues of birthing and abortion.
Gender issues thus played a central role not only in Chyti-
lová’s early films but also in her life and career throughout the
1960s, both in the form of obstacles posed to her as a talented and
determined woman seeking to realize her potential in a society
imbued with conventional gender expectations and in the form
of (possible) advantages and (latent) openings inscribed into the
official socialist rhetoric of gender equality. In looking at Chyti-
lová’s body of cinematic work, her own remarks, and interpreta-
tions that come down alternately enthusiastically for or skeptically
against the aptness of a feminist label, what may be overlooked is
the actual complexity of life and lived culture. Chytilová’s at times
angry refusal to be categorized as a feminist seems to speak of what
is overshadowed when one is declared to be just one thing and
to indicate her concern over the potential neglect of other issues
about which she cared deeply. In order to address the limitations
she confronted in a way that could lead to a polysemic liberation
on the levels of the artistic, the personal, and the sociopolitical,
70  •  Camera Obscura

Chytilová, it seems, found it necessary to resist being reduced to

any one descriptive label.

The Fruit of Paradise

Fruit was conceived of, written, and produced between 1967 and
1969 — just prior to, during, and immediately after the invasion of
Czechoslovakia by the ostensibly friendly Warsaw Pact armies in
August 1968. The film was still allowed to be completed, and it was
released in Czechoslovak cinemas in 1969. In Chytilová’s words,
“They didn’t ban it because nobody understood it” (187). Chyti-
lová remembers the puzzled 1970 Cannes audience’s response to
Fruit, explaining, “The journalists were asking what exactly this
movie was supposed to be about and what had happened to my
style. And I already could not freely express and explain myself”
(187). This must have been a frustrating experience for the direc-
tor, especially as it contrasted with the praise international crit-
ics had lavished on Daisies. In her autobiography, Chytilová, again
free to express herself, explicates Fruit thus:

It is a story of love, friendship, and betrayal, constructed around a

classical marriage triangle. . . . We wrote the script with Ester as an
allegory about Paradise, from which we have been banished because
we have learned the truth. . . . Ester suggested that we could base the
plot on an actual story from the news about a murderer of women.
She thought that we could use this basic plot to examine more broadly
conceived questions of truth and lie, friendship and betrayal, which
were preoccupying society in 1968. (181)

In a 1967 interview with Antonín J. Liehm (published for the

first time in 1974), Chytilová spoke of the screenplay — authored,
according to this interview, mostly by Ester Krumbachová — a s
“the very first script I thoroughly like.”13 And what was the screen-
play about, according to Chytilová, at this stage? Emphasizing
that a final product could end up far from where a project origi-
nally began, Chytilová answered: “Roughly speaking, it is about
an unequal struggle between man and woman. Above that is the
question of whether one can bear the truth” (269).
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 71

It is notable that on both of these occasions Chytilová

describes the film as engaging gender issues, while in the same
breath she diminishes the weight of this interpretation by suggest-
ing it constitutes only the first, immanent level of the film’s mean-
ing. Chytilová acknowledges that the battle of the sexes composes
the basic plot. But, according to the filmmaker’s comments, a work
of art needs to transcend the immediate, surface level and reach
another, more abstract dimension to avoid being bound to a trivial
commonplaceness. While one might puzzle over the sexist impli-
cations of this line of thinking, which suggests that the reality of
patriarchy is too obvious to constitute the essence of truth or even
a proper object of inquiry, this view needs to be considered in the
Czech cultural context. In this context, women’s voices and stories
have traditionally been enlisted to express the aspirations of the
entire national community, especially at times when the commu-
nity’s political ambitions could not be articulated openly.
Dating back to the nineteenth century and to the Czech
nationalist struggle against Austro-­Hungarian domination, Czech
authors would habitually project the nation’s longing for freedom
onto stories of women’s suffering. For instance, Hana Kvapilová,
considered the first Czech national actress, was celebrated on the
fin-­de-­siècle stage specifically because of her perceived ability to
portray women characters’ desire for self-­realization in a way that
expressed the whole nation’s spirit and longing for freedom.14 The
layering of narrative meaning utilized by earlier nationalist writers
and now, more than half a century later, invoked in Chytilová’s com-
ments above is not surprising or out of place for the Czechoslovak
New Wave. Necessitated this time by state censorship rather than
Austrian domination, the practice of working simultaneously on
several narrative planes resulted in New Wave films distinguished
for their complexity.
In our reading of Fruit, the message at the heart of the
allegory that Chytilová alludes to in her comments goes beyond
the basic plot of an unequal struggle between men and women.
This message is articulated and imaged more intricately through
an alternative, subversive feminine aesthetic that corresponds to
what French philosopher of sexual difference Hélène Cixous names
72  •  Camera Obscura

écriture féminine, a concept also theorized by Luce Irigaray and Julia

Kristeva.15 Commenting on Chytilová’s work, Iordanova writes
that “her ‘feminism’ could be seen as more complex than a simple
engagement with the political causes of the day; it is a feminism
found in images rather than in spoken words.”16 In a more elabo-
rated way, Hanáková suggests that the feminist potential of Daisies
and Krumbachová’s 1970 film Vražda ing. Čerta (Murder of Engineer
Devil ) rests in their eruptive — “medusan, anarchic, freewheeling” — 
feminist aesthetics and disruption of the phallocratic order.17
These aesthetics, according to Hanáková, strikingly contrast with
those of the films produced by male directors of the Czechoslo-
vak New Wave, in which “the basic terms of human condition (the
questions of freedom, truthfulness, and heroism) [also explored
by Chytilová] are often brought back to a markedly conservative
framework of traditional gender roles and positions” (63).
Our analysis of Fruit is in line with Iordanova’s and Haná­
ková’s insights and their line of thinking concerning Daisies, and
we likewise find the discourse of sexual difference particularly
relevant for the Czech cinematic context. Our attention to the
aesthetic, in the tradition of sexual difference theorists’ consider-
ation of questions of style, is also congruent with Susan Sontag’s
classic plea against the tendency in art criticism to separate form
from content, treating content as essential and form as either irrel-
evant or secondary.18 This approach, Sontag asserts, ignores that
“the distinctive feature [of works of art] is not that they give rise to
conceptual knowledge but to something like an excitation” (21).
Sontag’s appeal serves as a particularly germane prompt for an
engagement of the expressive potentials mobilized in an affect-
ing film such as Fruit. Rather than looking at Chytilová’s formal
experimentation as aesthetically disconnected, we take this film’s
intense but deliberately decentering sensory saturation as a novel
and poignant cinematic enactment of feminine difference.

Estrangement
Fruit leaves its audience with an overwhelming impression of
strangeness — of having made a peculiar excursion into the absurd.
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 73

This effect corresponds to what the filmmaking team consciously

strived to achieve and is also particularly apt for a work produced
under the surreal historical circumstances of the 1968 invasion of
Czechoslovakia. In her autobiography, Chytilová reminisces about
staking out the location for the film’s open-­air scenes while tak-
ing up temporary residence at her parents’ house in North Bohe-
mia, where she and her husband Jaroslav Kučera — Fruit’s camera
operator and cinematographer — retreated with their two small
children upon hearing the news about Soviet tanks approaching
Prague.19
To explain our intention and inflection in using the terms
absurdity and alienation or estrangement in this article, we reference
an excerpt from one of Václav Havel’s letters to his wife, in which
he eloquently captures and describes the sense of alienation and
absurdity he and other Czech intellectuals experienced when faced
with the censorship and bureaucracy of Czechoslovak state social-
ism. Havel writes of “the impression that I am deeply alienated
from what goes on around me, that I don’t understand [the] logic
and meaning; the belief that I will remain, probably forever, dis-
tant, alien and incompatible with everything I think and feel.”20
The theatrical translation of absurdity and estrangement
in Fruit is first and foremost produced through the performance
style of actors Jitka Nováková (Eva), Jan Schmid (Robert, the Devil),
and Karel Novák ( Josef), all members of the experimental Studio
Ypsilon (fig. 2). Ypsilon developed and practiced a “naive” style of
acting influenced by painter Henri Rousseau’s understanding of
art, by puppet theater, and by the theater of the absurd.21 Admiring

Figure 2. Karel Novák as

Josef, Jitka Nováková
as Eva, and Jan Schmid
as Robert portrayed
conversing together in
The Fruit of Paradise
74  •  Camera Obscura

their experiments, Chytilová, in her biographer’s words, “elevated

their acting style to the level of principle in The Fruit of Paradise.”22
Studio Ypsilon’s naive acting style approximates the Brech­
tian Verfremdungseffekt in that both seek to engender a sense of
estrangement and defamiliarization in the audience. As Bertolt
Brecht articulates the concept, “the artist’s object [should be] to
appear strange and even surprising to the audience. . . . Everyday
things are thereby raised above the level of the obvious and auto-
matic.”23 However, the means that Fruit’s actors deploy to achieve
the effect of defamiliarization are different from those one finds
in Brechtian acting, with its emphasis on a self-­observing and self-­
aware performer who is always ready to step out of the role and
critically comment on what is happening onstage (93). Rather, the
Ypsilon actors produce a sense of strangeness by presenting the
world to their audience as if from the point of view of a child,
a stranger, or a puppet come alive that walks in bewilderment
through a world of convention without any basis for understanding
that world’s logic. The principle of their acting is thus closer to that
of the theater of the absurd, which is acknowledged to have con-
stituted the immediate inspiration for the French New Wave, and
which in the Czech context is best exemplified by Havel’s plays.24
Nováková adopts this acting style particularly masterfully,
enlisting it to evoke a childlike naïveté that is appropriate for the
figure of Eve in paradise and that also effectively captures a sense
of the peculiar contemporaneous historical and political circum-
stances. Watching Nováková as Eva, one gets the impression of
a young girl playfully dancing through the first part of the film,
largely unaware or in awe of the enigmatic conventions that rule
this place. It is as if she were walking through the landscape of life
with some understated bewilderment, not entirely sure of how to
act or of how the place works. In a particularly bizarre, comically
nonsensical scene, Eva takes the carrots that she picked up in a
garden behind the wall of the paradise-­like retreat that she and
the other characters inhabit and plays at being a gardener, bliss-
fully planting the full-­grown carrots in a patch of sandy soil in the
middle of marshes. Heightening the scene’s absurdity, she happens
upon the enigmatic stranger Robert’s briefcase, buried in the sand
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 75

and fallen leaves — bizarrely out of place. Surprised by Robert, Eva

feigns having a pleasant conversation, although anybody listening
to her would be puzzled by her nonsensical description of the sandy
soil as hard and full of slugs. This pleasant talk between acquain-
tances about nothing in particular, a common enough scene from
real life, is here exposed as absurd filler that enables those involved
to avoid speaking about what really matters. It is a distraction, a
ruse, and a game that all participants can see right through but
in which they continue to partake nonetheless. In this particular
episode with Robert’s briefcase, Eva uses chitchat to get out of a
situation that could potentially have been dangerous, as Robert
turns out to be a murderer. The use of a wide-­angle lens to exagger-
ate distance and proportion introduces a sense of claustrophobia
and vertigo to the scene in a manner that further grates against
and destabilizes the pretense of comfortable small talk.
Kučera’s innovative work with the camera and film stock
enhances the film’s overall impression of naive strangeness and
absurdity. Writing about Fruit in 1970, film critic Jan Kučera (no
apparent relation) describes some of the tricks Jaroslav Kučera
deployed while shooting and developing the film. “The multiplica-
tion of individual frames,” whereby in the laboratory a single frame
is copied three times, the next frame only once, the next one three
times again, and so on, is one trick he mentions that specifically
enhances the occasional puppetlike movement of the characters,
making their physical movements appear peculiarly disjointed, hic-
cupping, stuttering, tentative, and groping.25 Jan Kučera invokes
the world of dreams in characterizing the illusion this trick pro-
duces. While Jaroslav Kučera deploys it on several occasions in the
film, the effect becomes full blown in the unnerving, haunting cli-
max in which Robert menacingly pursues Eva through the woods.
Here the camerawork, combined with the acting and Zdeněk
Liška’s dramatic music, projects and induces a feeling of the night-
marish, panic-­stricken paralysis of failed flight. Using a handheld
camera and once again implementing the wide angle’s distorted
depth of field, Kučera dramatically emphasizes the forest and its
objects, bringing the landscape to life and producing the illusion
of a malevolent, enchanted forest that schemes to hinder Eva as she
76  •  Camera Obscura

flees Robert. Inanimate objects get in the way of Eva’s race for life,
starting with a red sash that Robert throws at her and from which
she has a hard time disentangling herself, and again with the frame
of a French window that somehow places itself in the way of her
feet, making Eva stumble. Robert’s bike lying in the grass provides
a further obstacle; then tree trunks stand in Eva’s way, and twigs
and branches come to life to entangle her and hinder her progress.
Repeatedly, Eva stumbles, gets up, but falls again, as if the weight of
it all is too much for her. The forest becomes a strange, animated
place, as if it were borrowed from one of the Grimm brothers’
fairy tales. Other fairy tale – like moments in the film include Eva
falling asleep upon tasting an apple, reminiscent of “Snow White”
(“Šípková Růženka”), and Eva acting on her curiosity and unlock-
ing and rummaging through Robert’s chamber, a scene evocative
of “Fitcher’s Bird” (“Třináctá komnata”). The castle-­like mansion,
somewhat dilapidated and overgrown with vines and wild roses,
that forms part of the mise-­en-­scène invokes “Sleeping Beauty,” as
do the rose brooches and colorful veils marking Eva’s wardrobe.
And Robert’s plush brownish outfit will remind the Czech viewer
of the devils (čerti) who are frequent and not always frightening
characters in Czech folklore.26
Some of the other devices Jan Kučera describes the film
crew using to create the illusion of a peculiar, distorted, and other-
worldly place include the horizonless shooting of open-­air scenes,
which produces an ambiguous sense of scale in which nature
appears to be the same size as human figures; a consistent elimi-
nation of shadows reminiscent of naive paintings, “which creates a
sense of a strange reality alienated from the reality of the viewer”;
and the use of warm pastel colors throughout the film, which “pro-
duces a pleasant sense in the audience” that clashes with the plot.27
Kučera also draws attention to the role played by Liška’s music,
revealing that the original intention was “to have the actors sing
the lines and produce a film-­opera” (362). While this approach was
eventually discarded, according to Kučera, Chytilová worked with
the melody and tone of the actors’ voices, modulating them to reg-
ister on two different semantic levels: realistic/informational and
allegorical/stylized (363). This distinction is clear in the final prod-
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 77

uct, where on occasion the actors break into a different narrative

plane through vocal modulation. For instance, when Josef comes
to pick up Eva from her bizarre planned rendezvous with Robert
and finds her precariously balancing on a stone in the middle of
the marshes, he momentarily switches his stylized, heroic voice for
a more realistic one to quip, “Actually, how did you get over there?”
The viewer is thus reminded of the constructed nature of the film.
When the actors use their stylized voice modulation, Kučera points
out, they create the impression that their “voices and ideas [a]re
reaching us from another world” (363). To further enhance the
bizarre, overall defamiliarizing effect of the film, the dialogue was
dubbed in postproduction with little attention to sound synchro-
nization and with the two main male actors’ voices dubbed, much
to their chagrin, by different actors.28
As a childlike figure, Eva at first appears to lack conscious
motives for her actions, although from the beginning there are
glimpses of her emerging awareness. By the film’s conclusion, Eva’s
awakening appears complete, although the truths she finds herself
confronted by are neither painless nor easy. The painful search
for truth is the intended and explicit meaning of the film on an
abstract, universal level, as Chytilová emphasizes in interviews.
Read in terms of the social context in which the film was made,
this search could be interpreted as a representation of how Czechs
of the Prague Spring generation came to realize their ultimate
lack of freedom to determine the future of their country given
its position in a broader world they could not control. The narra-
tive harbors further intricacy and sophistication from a feminist
perspective. The consciousness that the protagonist reaches by the
end of the film is gender specific, and the progress of her coming-­
to-­consciousness is hindered by gender-­specific obstacles. On occa-
sions when Eva, still in her girlish stage, does show some awareness
and curiosity, these qualities are immediately dismissed, mocked,
and trivialized by the other two (male) characters. For instance,
when her husband Josef receives a perfumed letter, he dismisses
Eva’s curiosity about his correspondent with a patronizing, “You are
in a bad mood again, aren’t you?”
There are several dramatically foregrounded moments in
78  •  Camera Obscura

which Eva’s coming-­to-­consciousness is accelerated. The knowledge

that she reaches at these moments and that allows her to gradu-
ally leave behind her child-­or doll-­like existence (and paradise) is
remarkable from a feminist perspective. Her transformation, which
takes place in several segments, is marked by her realization that
Robert is the wanted murderer of six women; that Josef has indeed
been unfaithful to her but that she as a woman is expected to stay
faithful to him; that nobody will believe her loud accusations of
Robert, the murderer; that the two men’s experience of manhood
bonds them together and against her as a woman; that she has to
take things into her own hands as a result; and finally, that being
a woman who takes things into her own hands ends with being
expelled from paradise. Thus the truth at the core of the film,
as borne by the sympathetically portrayed Eva, is unambiguously
gender specific and has to do with sexist prejudices and gender
injustice. It is noteworthy that as Eva comes to recognize the sexist
stereotypes ruling her existence, and as she realizes they hinder
the process of achieving justice, she emphatically rejects them. No
longer a childlike figure, Eva seduces the seducer and murderer
of women Robert and, in a stylized game of friendship, love, and
betrayal, kills him with his own pistol.
As mentioned above, Eva is rendered sympathetically,
remarkable for a director renowned for a cold, mocking, critical,
and even sarcastic approach to her characters. We agree with Jan
Žalman, who notes that while these typical characteristics of
Chytilová’s approach are present in the film’s treatment of Robert
and Josef, Eva is portrayed warmly and even lovingly.29 Viewers
empathize with Eva’s half-­conscious jealousy over the perfumed
letter addressed to her husband, enjoy her playful energy, and feel
infuriated when Josef addresses her patronizingly or when Josef
and Robert speak of her in the third person while she is present.
We feel Eva’s frustration when Josef befriends Robert in a bond
that excludes her based on their shared sense of a self-­servingly
and chauvinistically presumed men’s burden of having to deal with
supposedly irrational and moody women and on these men’s sense
of superiority over the second sex. We may fear for Eva’s life as she is
chased by Robert through the enchanted forest. We find a certain
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 79

satisfaction in seeing Eva outsmart the clever Robert at his own

game by taking advantage of his habit of underestimating her capa-
bilities. And we feel her loneliness and perceive the injustice when
she, attempting to return to the retreat/paradise, is rebuffed by
Josef’s shocked and horror-­stricken face, which conveys the shame
that she should presumably be feeling and communicates to her
that she does not belong in this/his world anymore — that there is
no place here for such as her.
As an allegorical and multidimensional Truth is narrated
through the film, the structure and logic of the world in which
this truth is lodged is exposed and unraveled. That structure oper-
ates in ways that satisfy masculine sexual desire and exclude or
frustrate the active feminine, increasingly represented by Eva. The
film exposes the ways in which this exclusion is orchestrated — both
at the level of the plot and at the aesthetic level, as we will discuss
below. It represents that exclusion as unjust, encourages the active
feminine to disturb the phallocratic order, and leaves the viewer
with an image of a feminine “nonplace” of color as a possible, even
if unresolved, alternative. Three remarkable women — the deter-
mined director, the fairy tale – and allegory-­loving screenwriter,
and the talented actress — joined forces in the marshes of North
Bohemia, producing a film in which the unequal battle of the sexes
ends up constituting much more than a basic plot.

“Ne crede colori”

“Do not trust color,” the seventeenth-­century Italian scientist
Carlo Fracassati wrote. 30 In the final section of this article we
wish to examine more closely the alternative feminine aesthetic
developed in Fruit, focusing on the role that color — a category
that, like the feminine, has been marginalized in the history of
Western art — is enlisted to play in this aesthetic. We argue that
the film explores the long-­established affinities between and sus-
picions about the feminine and the chromatic. Here, one solicits
the help of the other, disrupting the two versions of the androcen-
tric aesthetic represented in the film: the dull, conventional, and
patronizing masculinity of the monochromatic beige Josef and
80  •  Camera Obscura

the mysterious, charismatic, but ultimately menacing masculinity

of the devilish, red-­toned (from red earth to crimson) Robert.
Color is a difficult subject of discussion for film and art
criticism, as Brian Price, Rosalind Galt, and others observe, to
the point where some scholars, such as David Batchelor, posit its
neglect as a form of chromophobia.31 Batchelor argues that since
antiquity, “color has been the object of extreme prejudice in West-
ern culture” and has been systematically marginalized and deval-
ued.32 According to Batchelor, this “purging of color” happens in
two ways: color is viewed as alien and thus dangerous, and it gets
linked with the foreign, primitive, feminine, infantile, or queer;
or color is treated as a supplementary, superficial, and cosmetic
element, unworthy of serious consideration (22  – 23). Kristeva
similarly comments on the traditional fear and mistrust of color in
Western philosophy, speculating that the “chromatic experience
constitutes a menace to the self [while also cradling] the self’s
attempted reconstitution.”33 Along with others, Kristeva notes
that in Western civilization color has been habitually equated with
unseemly passion, and she herself associates it with jouissance, the
feminine (224), and the transgressive:

Color might . . . be the space where the prohibition foresees and gives
rise to its own immediate transgression. It achieves the momentary
dialectic of law — the laying down of One Meaning so that it might
at once be pulverized, multiplied into plural meanings. Color is the
shattering of unity. Thus, it is through color — colors — that the subject
escapes the alienation within a code (representational, ideological,
symbolic, and so forth) that it, as conscious subject, accepts. (221)

The distrust of color throughout much of the history of

both Western art criticism and modern science and the related
projection of a disruptive and subversive potential onto color
by dissident thinkers seeking alternatives to the “Order of One”
seem to draw on the elusive, subjective, constructed, polysemic,
and unreliable (because unfixable) nature of color.34 Studying
color inevitably foregrounds the epistemological and ontological
unfixedness of the world around us, the fleeting and precarious
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 81

experiential character of images, and the ultimate lack of stillness

in the sense perceptions through which the world reaches the eye.
Consisting of ephemeral light, waves, and particles; changing with
the source of illumination; and perceived differently by different
subjects, colors — and thus images — constantly shift, undergoing
perpetual changes and transformations. Color is stubbornly fleet-
ing, the epitome of fluidity, another quality that associates it with
the feminine as envisioned by theorists of sexual difference.
Irigaray draws parallels between the exclusion of the femi-
nine from the symbolic order and the symbolic order’s preference
for fixed forms and solids rather than forms perceived as fluid.35
This association has implications for Irigaray’s figuration of a wom-
en’s language and a feminine aesthetic. Critical of the conventional
“staging of representation according to exclusively ‘masculine’
parameters” (68) and seeking to envisage new ways in which one
might express the traditionally misconceived and suppressed “vir-
tual feminine,” Irigaray sketches an alternative feminine aesthetic
by invoking and recoding modalities — such as fluidity, heterogene-
ity, plurality, touch, and nearness — that are conventionally associ-
ated with the feminine and dismissed in the androcentric imagi-
nary. Whereas in the phallocratic system of representation “the
feminine finds itself defined by lack and deficiency,” Irigaray calls
for a style of expression that would capture and release feminine
sexual difference’s “disruptive excess” (78). Even as she acknowl-
edges the extent to which our grammars of expression have been
formed and imprinted inescapably within symbolic systems, Iriga-
ray theorizes this alternative virtual feminine subjectivity in terms
of fluid and dynamic intersubjective encounters.
Reading Fruit in light of Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s observa-
tions, we describe the alternative feminine aesthetic that Fruit  devel-
ops and explore the ways in which Chytilová’s chromatic vocabulary
animates and at times enables a certain sensual dynamic that will
not remain contained within the frame. We begin with Eric Rohm-
er’s distinction between two categories of the “best color films.”
The first consists of films that “we remember for their harmony,
their general tonality, in which the director, the set designer, the
costume designer, and the photographer wanted to create a work,
82  •  Camera Obscura

if not of painters, at least of men [sic] sensitive to pictorial matters.”

Color in these films, according to Rohmer, “touches, underlines,
substantiates the dramatic texture, yet, it is never its only source.”
The second category includes films in which “color is occasion-
ally, but then unquestionably, in charge. These films haunt us not
so much because of their overall climate as because of the power
of certain details, of colored objects.”36 Fruit fits in both of these
categories. There are moments in the film when color, along with
fabrics, textures, and the accompanying score, plays the supporting
function of generating a certain ambience in the mise-­en-­scène,
and there are occasions when color helps substantiate a particular
meaning. But there are also affecting and haunting moments in
the film when color is “unquestionably in charge,” when watching
the film becomes pure sensual experience.
Throughout the film, warm, brownish, unsaturated earth
hues, occasionally switched for a combination of equally warm
beige and orange tones, are enlisted to produce an autumnal,
mostly calm and placid, ambience. If the atmosphere these colors
evoke contrasts, as Žalman observes, with the “basic criminal-­story
plot,”37 the tones of changing and decaying leaves and autumn ber-
ries also evoke the world of fairy tales, most of which, after all, are
set in mysterious forests or dark chambers. Against this warm and
calm background, one can easily use a bright red color to mark off
certain characters, as occurs several times throughout the film. As
we will discuss, the color red plays an increasingly central role in
the film, at times entirely dominating the visual field.
There are other ways in which Chytilová and Krumbachová,
the film’s costume designer, employ color to help suggest a mean-
ing or to cloak characters in a particular ambience. The tones of
Josef’s clothes never break out of the gray-­beige palette, aiding in
creating an impression of him as dull, monotonous, and unimagi-
native. Much more intense and emotive colors, specifically red and
deep burgundy, are used throughout the film to establish a visual
link between Eva and the charismatically alluring but ultimately
dangerous Robert. Krumbachová prepared an intriguing color
palette for these two characters’ wardrobes, starting them off with
outfits made from the same iridescent velvet fabric with a difficult-­
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 83

to-­pin-­down deep burgundy hue with rust undertones. The fabric’s

iridescent color marks these characters — particularly Robert, who
wears this fabric throughout the film — as complex, enigmatic, and
slippery. In addition to its color, the fabric is distinguished by its
plush, velvety texture, which solicits the viewer’s sense of touch.
The tactile impression of Robert’s velvet and terry cloth and of
Eva’s velvet, lace, and silk fabrics contrasts with Josef’s bland, one-­
dimensional textiles, which reflect his dull, rationally cool and
patronizing, and bureaucratic and officious type of masculinity.
This gray-­beige aesthetic, apprehensive of intense color (as the
film’s last scene suggests), marks off a masculinity whose existence
appears to require infantilizing and stifling Eva’s creativity and
imagination permanently.
From her earliest scenes, Eva shares something of Robert’s
chromatic disposition; she initially wears a feminine version of
Robert’s iridescent deep burgundy velvet motif, accessorized with
a white flower brooch. Eva’s white flower and naive curiosity suggest
a childlike innocence that underlies whatever destination might
await her. Early in the film, an iconic scene depicts Eva and Josef
asleep together as husband and wife. Their bare flesh blends with
her cream silk negligee and the beige satin sheets, inviting us to
see the couple as on some level made of the same ordinary beige
stuff. But as much as Josef proves to be set in his ways, so Eva fash-
ions herself as a work in progress and moving target. Her next
costume, a petite white dress and pink flower brooch, gives the
impression of a daringly curious adolescent; in this garb, she tres-
passes into a stranger’s room. This costume signals Eva’s transition
from a character of unreflective curiosity to one who recognizes
danger. Her subsequent refashioning in pink-­on-­pink marks the
emergence of her newfound confidence. Foreshadowing a more
potent encounter she will have with Robert, in this scene Eva awk-
wardly uses a long, flowing pink sash to try to ensnare a waiter.
Josef and Robert watch nearby and laugh at her antics, but not
long after, Eva excites Robert’s advances and solicits his invitation
to go on an excursion together. Reclothed subsequently in formal
white lace by her now jealous husband, and seated with Josef at a
fancy table, sipping white wine from crystal, Eva wears an ensemble
84  •  Camera Obscura

featuring an unequivocally vivid red brooch. Her demeanor is by

now self-­collected and contemptuous, and she coolly calculates the
disposal of her unwanted consort/keeper by sending him on an
awkward misadventure on a crowded dance floor. In her impend-
ing climactic encounter with Robert, the color red takes center
stage, where it remains with dramatic emphasis until the film’s
conclusion, approaching a constitutive modality of cinematic voice.
Returning to Rohmer’s observations about color in film, we
note that Fruit contains numerous scenes, increasing in frequency as
the narrative unfolds, in which color takes over and imprints itself
onto the viewer’s memory. In Fruit, this function is reserved for the
color red, which, as suggested above, plays an increasingly dominant
role in the film. It is first used with Robert to distinguish him from
others during a beach ball game and then passed onto Eva (who
previously wore burgundy, white, or pink) when Robert wraps her
in his bright red terry cloth bathrobe. Red becomes a wobbly opti-
cal blot in a scene in which Eva — wearing a red dress — strives to
symbolically fulfill Robert’s desire to place her on a pedestal by
balancing precariously on a stone he has prepared for her, bizarrely,
in the middle of the marshes. A long, bright red sash, snaking
through the forest and the meadows, again links the two when Robert
chases Eva.
At the end of the chase, Eva’s white dress is transformed by
Robert’s actions and desire into a bright red one. At that moment,
red is still part of Robert’s palette, and he beholds Eva in red with
satisfaction, like an artist contemplating the product of his work.
Indeed, Robert’s passion is based on momentarily beholding the
beauty of women from a distance before abandoning or murdering
them and moving on to the next target. But while Eva’s association
with red is passed on to her from Robert, she ultimately exposes
the predatory principle of his masculinist aesthetic and makes red
her own color, central to her own specifically feminine aesthetic. In
a carefully stylized and visually mesmerizing red, black, and white
scene, Robert, wearing a black coat, faces a red-­clad Eva, behold-
ing her once more from a distance, and Eva takes advantage of
his masculine weakness. While capable of murdering women, this
Don Juan will not let a woman be cold. Wrapping his black coat,
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 85

Figure 3. Eva in The

Fruit of Paradise

pistol in its pocket, around Eva, Robert seals his own fate. The next
moment, the woman on the pedestal stands up, unfolding her red-
ness fully, and shoots the murderer. At this point, Eva makes the
black-­and-­red combination, symbolized by the black pistol and the
red rose brooch she holds in her hands, her own (fig. 3).
Leading up to the last scene, in which Eva’s embodiment
of red, dramatically enhanced by her deep black framing, ulti-
mately takes over the visual field, the viewer has experienced
numerous episodes in which color has been allowed to seep out
of — to smudge and blur — the lines designating its borders. As in
Daisies, Chytilová pushed Kučera to apply his home experiments
with color photomontage in Fruit, and the entire biblical choral
prologue to the film is devoted to Kučera’s visual and Liška’s musi-
cal experimentations. Kučera’s scenographic work opens the film
with double-­exposed vibrant flower and leaf designs over images
of stylized tableaux of naked extras posing as Adam and Eve, elic-
iting a powerful sensual experience that is further enhanced by
Liška’s choral cantatas. Throughout the prologue, the chromatic
reigns visually, and the double film exposure produces a pictorial
design that showcases and explores the sensual impact of fluidly
changing color combinations. If, as Batchelor and others note, the
history of Western art criticism is marked by a generally unrec-
ognized struggle between line/drawing and color — “disegno versus
colore” — in which color is coded as feminine and must be subordi-
nated to “the masculine discipline of design or drawing,” this pre-
86  •  Camera Obscura

scription is clearly challenged in Fruit’s prologue.38 Furthermore,

other scenographic experiments, such as the use of different film
speeds, are deployed throughout the film to produce out-­of-­focus
images in which figures move so quickly that their colors smudge
and blur. Color here once again escapes its prescribed submission
to the masculine line as it bleeds out of its borders.
This visual effect is deployed specifically as an emphatic
accent indicative of Eva’s memory, imagination, or state of mind,
especially when in distress. Whereas the aesthetic palettes associ-
ated with Eva and Robert have some shared qualities that clearly
distinguish both of them from Josef’s gray, monotonous dullness,
they also differ in the meanings they lend to each character. With
Robert, red is used to visually mark him as either exhilarating (dur-
ing the beach ball game) or ominous (when he pushes the stone
prepared for Eva’s murder). With Eva, different tones of pink or
red represent, through the changing color of her dress and her
rose brooch, the different states of her femininity, with the final
bright red-­and-­black combination signaling her mature, aware,
and assertive sexuality and sensibility. Robert expects Eva to stand
still, like a doll or mannequin, so that he can better behold her.
Eva, however, does not stay still: she refuses to become an object
or a corpse, her unpredictable swaying movements keeping more
perilous fates at bay.
This is the red that Eva first wears and then shakes off to
offer to Josef in the final scene as she approaches him from a dis-
tance. Strangeness blends with estrangement as Josef turns away
from her advance and Eva becomes a blurry apparition. Eva and
her bright red are rejected by Josef’s horrified, shielded look, which
turns cool and self-­possessed before he averts himself, finally, from
this bewitching dance of color. And it is with an image of this dance
of red-­and-­black cacophony, in the end taking up almost the entire
visual field — a dance in which the color merges with Eva’s face to
the point that one becomes the other — that the film leaves the
audience, as its final offer of an alternative aesthetic in which the
power of the chromatic and active feminine desire are released.
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 87

Notes

1. Fruit  was written and produced between 1967 and 1969,

contemporaneously with the brief blossoming and then even
swifter suppression of the Prague Spring. Coproduced by the
Czechoslovak state studio Barrandov and the Belgian Elisabeth
Films Bruxelles, the film was a collaboration between Věra
Chytilová (director and screenwriter), Ester Krumbachová
(screenwriter and costume designer), Jaroslav Kučera (camera
operator and cinematographer, and at the time Chytilová’s
husband), and actors of the experimental Studio Ypsilon ( Jitka
Nováková, Jan Schmid, and Karel Novák). Zdeněk Liška, a
celebrated Czech composer, wrote the film’s haunting score.
Belgian cosponsors arranged for Fruit’s entry at the 1970 Cannes
Film Festival, although it had a disappointing reception there.

2. Daisies, also coproduced with Krumbachová and Kučera, has

long been recognized by feminist scholars for its fiery subversion
of traditional gender roles.

3. Martin Komárek, Jan Lipold, and Roman Gallo, “Věra

Chytilová,” in GEN: 100 Čechů dneška (podle TV projektu Fera Feni če)
[GEN: 100 contemporary Czechs (based on a TV project by Fero
Fenič)] (Prague: Fischer, 1994), 148. All translations of Czech
sources cited in this article are by Iveta Jusová.

4. Malgorzata Radkiewicz, “Angry Young Girls: Gender

Representations in Věra Chytilová’s Sedmikrásky and Pasti, pasti,
pasti čky,” Kinoeye 2, no. 8 (2002), www.kinoeye.org/02/08
/radkiewicz08.php.

5. Bliss Cua Lim, “Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory,”

Camera Obscura, no. 47 (2001): 37 – 77.

6. Petra Hanáková, “Voices from Another World: Feminine Space

and Masculine Intrusion in Sedmikrásky and Vražda ing. Čerta,”
in East European Cinema, ed. Aniko Imre (New York: Routledge,
2005), 64.

7. Kate Connolly, “Bohemian Rhapsodist,” Guardian, 10 August

2000, www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/aug/11/culture.features2.

8. Dina Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and

Artistry of East Central European Film (London: Wallflower, 2003),
123.
88  •  Camera Obscura

9. Jiřina Šiklová, “Why We Resist Western-­Style Feminism,”

Transitions 5, no. 1 (1998), www.tol.org/client/article/4975-­why
-­we-­resist-­western-­style-­feminism.html.

10. Jiřina Šmejkalová, “Strašidlo feminismu v českém ‘porevolučním’

tisku: Úvaha, doufejme, historická” [Monster of feminism in
Czech “postrevolutionary” media], in Žena a muž v médiích [Man
and woman in media], ed. Hana Havelková and Mirek Vodrážka
(Prague: Gender Studies, 1998), 17.

11. Quoted in Galina Kopaněvova, “Když se řekne Věra Chytilová”

[When we say Věra Chytilová], Filma a doba 47, no. 1 (2001): 9.

12. Věra Chytilová and Tomáš Pilát, Věra Chytilová zblízka [Věra
Chytilová in close-­up] (Prague: Nakladatelství XYZ, 2010),
175 – 76.

13. Antonín J. Liehm, Ostře sledované filmy: Československá zkušenost

[Closely watched films: The Czechoslovak experience] (Prague:
Národní filmový archív, 2011), 267.

14. Iveta Jusová, “Re-­Inflecting Femininity on the Czech Fin-­de-­Siècle

Stage: An Analysis of Hana Kvapilová’s Acting Style,” Theatre
History Studies 24 (2004): 35.

15. See Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in The Portable
Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010), 27 – 39. The term écriture féminine as it is used here applies
across the work of Irigaray and Kristeva as well. Questions
of familiarity with these specific theorists’ work aside, the
sensibilities of French intellectual culture would not have been
lost on Chytilová, who was fluent in French and keenly aware of
New Wave cinema’s roots in France.

16. Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe, 124.

17. Hanáková, “Voices from Another World,” 63.

18. See Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against

Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1966), 8.

19. Chytilová and Pilát, Věra Chytilová zblízka, 178.

20. Václav Havel to Olga Havlová, 21 March 1981, in Letters to Olga,

ed. and trans. Paul Wilson (London: Faber and Faber, 1988),
177.
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 89

21. Zdeněk Hořínek, “Můj život s Ypsilonkou” [My life with Ypsilon],
in Čtení o Ypsilonce [About Ypsilon], ed. Jaroslav Etlík and Jan
Schmid (Prague: Studio Ypsilon, 1993), 6.

22. Pilát, in Chytilová and Pilát, Věra Chytilová zblízka, 184.

23. Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht

on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John
Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 92.

24. On the theater of the absurd and the French New Wave, see
Richard John Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema,
2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 24.

25. Jan Kučera, “Eva neboli hledání” [Eve or searching], Film a doba
15, no. 7 (1970): 360.

26. Screenwriter and costume designer Krumbachová has published

a collection of original fairy tales, and Jan Žalman has noted of
her: “she thinks in allegories.” Jan Žalman, Uml čený film: Kapitoly z
bojů o lidskou tvá ř československého filmu IX [Silenced film: Chapters
from battles for the human face of the Czechoslovak film IX]
(Prague: Národní filmový archív, 1993), 153.

27. Kučera, “Eva neboli hledání,” 360 – 61.

28. Chytilová and Pilát, Věra Chytilová zblízka, 182.

29. Žalman, Uml čený film, 152.

30. Carlo Fracassati, quoted in Domenico Bertoloni Meli, “The

Color of Blood: Between Sensory Experience and Epistemic
Significance,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine
Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011), 131.

31. Brian Price, introduction to Color: The Film Reader, ed. Angela
Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1;
Rosalind Galt, “Pretty: Film Theory, Aesthetics, and the History
of the Troublesome Image,” Camera Obscura, no. 71 (2009): 4;
David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000).

32. Batchelor, Chromophobia, 22.

33. Julia Kristeva, “Giotto’s Joy,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic

Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas
Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), 220.
90  •  Camera Obscura

34. Meli, “Color of Blood,” 119.

35. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter
with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985),
111.

36. Eric Rohmer, “Of Taste and Colors,” in Dalle Vacche and Price,
Color, 123.

37. Žalman, Uml čený film, 151.

38. Batchelor, Chromophobia, 28, 23.

Iveta Jusová, PhD, is associate professor of women’s and gender

studies and of literature and director of the Women’s and Gender
Studies in Europe program at Antioch University. Jusová’s research
areas include Czech and British literatures, continental feminist
philosophy, and postcolonial studies. Along with her book The New
Woman and the Empire (Ohio State University Press, 2005),  Jusová
has published articles in Feminist Theory, Women’s Studies International
Forum, Social Text, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Theatre History
Studies, and Slavic and East European Journal, among others.

Dan Reyes, PhD, is a visiting faculty member at Antioch University,

teaching cultural studies and philosophy. He is also a frequent
visiting faculty member at Miami University’s Department of
Architecture and Interior Design. Reyes’s areas of research include
visual cultural studies along with philosophical studies in education.
His contributions have appeared in Social Text; Review of Education,
Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies; Taboo; and Philosophical Studies in
Education.
 Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise  • 91

Figure 4. Eva in the final scene of The Fruit of Paradise